So he has come up enough for you to see the torchlight, but now he’s got to stay there until his blood is used to the lighter water.
If that is his torch. It could be some sort of glowing fish; or maybe it’s only something you’re imagining.
Pat dragged his eyes away from the dark and watched his bubbles jostling on the way to the bright water. And suddenly there was a small eruption near the Tub and a dark figure swam out of the spreading disturbance.
Col and he is after you. You’re in trouble. Forget about you, what about Matt?
Col reached Pat in a few seconds and waved his hands at the open water around him. Where is he?
Pat pointed down at the glimmering light.
Col’s eyes glinted with anger through his mask. He jerked his thumb up. Get out now, kid! And he hurled himself after the spark.
Pat swam slowly to the Tub but he didn’t pull himself out of the water. He hung onto the anchor chain and stared into the bottomless green. If he left the water he would be blind to the depths, seeing just the glitter of the surface, and that he did not want at all. But he couldn’t see the spark now. He was afloat, with shafts from the sun around him picking out fish and currents. The brightness killed any spark.
But after a while he saw a small, round, bright disc below him. It drifted a little and suddenly disappeared.
All right, he doesn’t need the torch. Col has reached him.
Pat waited a little longer until he saw a blurred shape moving from the depths, then hauled himself onto the Tub. He had trouble getting his gear off because his fingers had wrinkled like an old man’s face. When he finally got the rubber suit off he was actually shivering under the red sun for a few minutes.
He slapped his hands together and when he started to make the coffee he squeezed the cups to take the warmth in his fingers. He came out of the galley with the steaming mugs and grinned broadly as Col pulled himself up.
But Col’s face was black.
21 / anger
‘Is Dad all right?’ Pat said anxiously. Col opened his mouth but seemed to bite a word off. ‘Maybe.’ Col seized one of Matt’s hands, lugging him aboard like a large fish.
Pat frowned. ‘Dad?’ That was the first time he’d said it up here, what happened?
‘Okay.’ Matt yanked his hand back.
‘What a bloody stupid thing to do!’ Col thumped his tank near Matt’s hand.
‘All right, all right.’
‘It’s not all right ’’ Col shook his head, and looked closely into his eyes. ‘How do you feel?’
‘I am great, I –’
‘Nothing wrong in your joints?’
Pat breathed in. Col was looking for signs of nitrogen in Matt’s blood. Little bubbles pressing against the nerves. That’s the beginning of the bends. His blood could be boiling with thousands of nitrogen bubbles right now. The only thing to do would be to get him down into deep water and hope the bubbles would dissolve in the blood.
‘It’s okay.’ Matt took his gear off and shivered in the sun.
‘Sure?’
‘Yes.’ Matt grabbed his coffee mug from Pat and with both hands lifted it to his mouth. ‘God, it’s cold down there.’
Col watched him in silence.
Matt glanced at Col. ‘I’m fine.’ He sighed. ‘All right, unload.’
‘Unload! That is the stupidest thing I’ve come across for years,’ Col hissed the words. ‘What were you thinking of?’
Pat stepped back and wished that he were not there.
‘Apart from anything else, you left your kid alone in the middle of the sea. His regulator could have packed up, he could have been drowning and I wouldn’t have known about it. And sharks, God ’’
Matt hunched his head and looked sideways at Pat. ‘I saw ’ It was dumb. Sorry Pat.’
Pat shook his head. ‘No, I’m all right. I’m all right ’’
Col steamrolled on. ‘The first lesson, the very first thing a scuba rookie learns, is that you don’t dive by yourself. And then you do that. You went in deep. God, you were coming up when I found you, who knows how far down you’d been.’
‘I know just how far.’
‘I thought you had the raptures.’
Pat bit his lip. Oh boy, you forgot about that. Raptures of The Deep, nitrogen narcosis. When nitrogen is breathed in under increasing pressure – like down there – it can whack the mind of a diver; he doesn’t know where he is or what to do. You got told how one diver was seen dancing in very deep water, before he turned and swam down to die ’
‘Come on, I’m not an idiot –’
Pat stared at Matt. God, he could have gone, with you floating over him like a sunfish and you wouldn’t have known.
‘Really, I reckon you have the raptures right now!’
Pat jerked his head. Yeah, you tell him.
‘Okay, give it a rest.’
‘What, you wanted to finish the accident’s job?’
Pat stood still, flicking his eyes between the two men.
Col saw Pat’s dazed face. ‘And he doesn’t know what it’s about. Like Beth. And I don’t know if I can really understand it. Why don’t you fix it with your kid, at least?’
Matt shook his head slowly. ‘My business.’
‘No. It’s not.’ And Col walked away, leaving Matt and Pat alone on the deck.
‘Well ’’ Matt glanced at Pat’s eyes.
Pat waited.
‘I suppose ’’ Matt unzipped his vest and pulled his arms free. ‘I don’t know if I can get it right.’
‘You were behind a truck ’’ Pat helped.
Matt nodded as he forced the neoprene suit down his legs. ‘A tip truck, rusty, red dust all over, so bad you couldn’t read the number plate. And it carried boulders. Not rocks, they were boulders. Some of them were as high as a Volkswagen. Maybe they were going to a council garden or were just ripped out from a building excavation, I don’t know. Anyway the truck stopped so quickly that I almost bumped it. So close I could see the grit floating from the boulders.’
He leaned on the rail and stared at the shimmering water. Pat was surprised to see that his arms were pocked with goose pimples despite the heat of the setting sun.
‘I had been driving with my bad customers’ fat files next to me and I was thinking more about those than my driving. My excuse. The truck lurched on and I followed it, this time staying a little bit back.’
Matt sighed softly. ‘So a guy in a red sports car screamed past me, jamming into the space between the tip truck and me. I had to hit the brakes to miss him. I am pounding the horn and I am yelling all the words I can think of at him and then he gives me the two-finger salute. I almost drove my car into him I was so bloody mad. But I didn’t.
‘Then the traffic stopped again. I was hissing at him: Well, what did that get you? Hey, hey! And then the truck begins to move.’
Mat rubbed his fingers over his throat as if to release a blockage. ‘I thought it was moving off, but the thing that was moving was the back of the truck – the tray. I didn’t know what I was seeing. The back end was beginning to swing from the body and a few pebbles dribbled over the bonnet of the sports car. I could see those massive hydraulic pumps shining on the red dust truck as they slowly grew. As if I’d started it with my bloody honking and yelling.
‘The cops said that it was probably caused by a short in the truck. Doesn’t matter. Then I realised what was happening and the guy in the sports car was also realising it. I could see his wide eyes in his mirror. I was yelling at him and he moved towards the door. But he stopped and just stared.
‘A huge boulder rolled a little bit against the back of the tray. The back snapped and swung free and the boulder dropped onto the sports car’s cockpit. Then the rocks came crashing down, flattening the car, bouncing on the road and one of them rolled across my passenger seat and onto my leg.’
‘Jesus,’ said Pat softly.
‘I was there for three hours while they moved my rock. I stared at my
fragmented files sticking out from under the rock and the one thing I could see of the guy – only a motionless hand. Spent all that time thinking that I should have been where the guy was. Why wasn’t I? Like that was a warning, telling me that I could die any time and I had not done anything ’’
Matt stopped, as if he was tasting his words, and glanced at Pat. ‘Apart from you and Beth, that sort of thing, you know. But I kept on thinking there’s got to be a better life than fiddling with figures ’ So on, so on. I just needed some time to work it through and Col came along with his Lady Jane, that’s it.’
Pat looked at Matt in silence.
Matt sucked his lip. ‘Do you understand?’
‘Sort of.’
‘But you don’t. That’s all right. Col doesn’t understand and I don’t know if I do.’
‘Mum doesn’t know what it is. She only knows it is something to do with the accident. She wants you back.’ Pat shifted his eyes to the still water.
‘Yeah, well.’
Pat hunched and sucked in a breath. ‘I thought it was my fault. Why you left.’
‘What? How the hell did you work that out?’
‘Dumb kid, bad marks. I dunno, I’m only a dumb kid.’
‘Oh, mate.’
Pat and Matt stared at the coiled smoke from the island for a long time.
When Col called them for dinner at sunset they trailed wearily along to the stern.
‘Well, did you fix it?’ Col said, cocking an eyebrow.
‘Don’t ask.’ Matt said thickly.
Pat moved his shoulders slightly and turned away.
Matt turned slowly to the quiet water. ‘Oh, yeah. I may have seen something down there.’
22 / night
After the meal, Matt finished filling the tanks for the next day’s deep dive. He was leaning on the rail, staring into the dark water, when Col came over.
‘Sorry, I did give you a hard time,’ Col said awkwardly.
Matt waved the apology away. ‘Forget it. You were right. I was thinking about how bad it could have been down there. It could have been like the Edinburgh – so far down that the divers had to live there for weeks, breathing helium and wearing suits with a hot water system. Maybe we’re lucky.’
‘You saw something down there.’
Matt nodded. ‘Just a shadow, lying under a ledge, where the sonar can’t reach. Maybe it was my ship. Maybe a current pushed it sideways as it came down, maybe, maybe ’ I wanted to keep on swimming down to see what it was. But I didn’t. Too deep.’
‘Tomorrow we’ll see.’
Matt turned to Col. ‘It’s always dark down there. Midday, midnight, it doesn’t matter.’
‘Ye-e-ss.’
‘Why don’t we go now?’
Col looked at Matt for a moment, then he shrugged. ‘Okay.’
Pat woke on the deck and stared at the explosion of stars above him.
Something had woken him, but what?
He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep. After Matt and Col had taken the dinghy he had sprawled on the warm deck. All the swimming, and the creeping fear in the chasm, had worn him out.
The Tub felt as stable as a pier, nothing moving, not even the creaking of planks releasing the heat of the day into the cool of the night. It was that late in the evening.
He propped on an elbow to peer over the Tub’s rail. The dinghy was sitting on polished black glass, dipping two long lines into the surface. One line was connected to the Tub and the second led to a grapnel on the other side of the chasm. A swollen moon showed that the dinghy was empty. How long had they been down there?
Pat glanced at his watch. No worries, they’ve been gone for less than half an hour.
You were probably woken up by a fish splash.
But there are no fish anywhere. They’re all asleep. If he danced about he could get the forty-foot Tub to send a ripple to the dinghy.
Then Pat started to hear a soft burr drifting across the dark water, sounding like a mosquito in the next room. He was picking up the murmur simply because there was no other sound at all.
He squinted in the direction of the sound, but there was nothing to see but a red flickering on the dark island.
A fishing boat?
He looked up at the radio mast. No navigation lights.
That’s because Matt doesn’t want them and you’re banned from switching on any other light, just in case they attract the wrong people.
The burr was becoming louder.
Pat stretched and slowly pulled himself to his feet.
The burr was breaking into two sounds. One was a shuddering, frantic rhythm and the other was more powerful and it roared over the first. Two engines.
Pat hesitated. Maybe better put the lights on? Just in case they hit the dinghy.
A sharp crack and the frantic engine howled, shying to the left like a hurt dog.
Pat forgot the lights, stumbled against the bronze lion and reeled across the deck to clutch at the rail. But he kept his eyes locked on the dark water until he could see black shapes moving towards him.
Flashes pierced the gloom as several reports burst over the roar of the racing engines.
Shots?
Pat crouched low.
A squat boat shuddered out of the shadows, sheered away and slid back into the darkness. Suddenly a searchlight flared in the dark, throwing a bright disc across the surface of the sea. The light picked out the white foam in the squat boat’s wake then skidded over the spreading ridges of water, a leaping hound after a rabbit. For an instant the light caught the squat boat, ran over it, dipped, jerked back and settled on a fishing boat.
Pat could see the nets heaped in the afterdeck. There was a man’s shadow in the wheelhouse and another man crouched near him. A flag was whipping at the short mast and ’
The constant reports were being muffled by a heavy chopping sound. Orange shadows sputtered against a high metal bridge as the long barrel of a skeletal gun coughed streams of fire into the night. In a few moments the deck of the fishing boat burst into flame, and the wheelhouse exploded. Its bow disintegrated and the shrieking engine plunged the carcass deep into the sea.
The gun stopped firing. The searchlight wandered around the empty water briefly then it was switched off as the dark metal boat turned back towards the island.
The fishing boat did not exist.
23 / dark water
Pat throttled the rail, his hands whitening. He felt as if he was trying to get himself to wake up from a nightmare. But it was real. All he could do was work out what he had seen.
That was the patrol boat. The one that pushed around us a few days ago. You saw that big gun with the cover over the nozzle, polished and oiled. You can remember the officer who ran it. The guy Matt called ‘the General’, who wanted to shoot us.
They chased that fishing boat and sank it. Just like that ’ These fishermen didn’t have a chance.
Pat let go the rail and flexed his fingers.
There was a flag on that fishing boat – was this the boat that gave us breakfast? With the old man and his hot-hot stew, the fish man and the kid – Ali? And you didn’t like the kid because he made you give him your knife, and now he’s dead.
Stop it, stop it.
There was something else ’
He stared at the water, trying to force his eyes to re-create the blazing boat before him.
There was a man crouching outside the wheelhouse, falling into the flames. An old man? Kakek? There was a man in the wheelhouse, Ramos, whirling the wheel, and waving something away ’
As if someone else was on board!
Then the wheelhouse, Kakek and Ramos were gone with the explosion. But you saw something in that boat just before it slid under the water. Ali could be on the boat – no, he is there! The flag was on the mast, that’s why the boat got sunk. Ali could be trapped in the wreck of the fishing boat.
Don’t be stupid. He’s gone.
But he just could be there. He could be in a
n air pocket, waiting to drown while you’re thinking about it.
Pat swivelled around and saw his tank leaning against the wheelhouse.
After that brawl over Matt’s solo dive he will kill you! Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. You have to try.
Pat stepped across the deck, snatched the tanks and slipped his arms into the webbing straps. He jammed on the lead belt, fins, mask, knife, compass, watch and torch and tumbled into the water. No time to put on the neoprene suit.
He washed out the mask as he tried to orient himself between the Tub and his idea of where the fishing boat had gone down.
Southeast, he thought. It’ll have to do, the boat was only two hundred metres away, wasn’t it?
He ducked into the water and kicked away from the Tub. He clicked on his torch in the still water. A school of small, silver fish drifted before him and flashed away; large shapes slid through the gloom. Moonlight, sunbeams, to the fish it all seems the same.
What if a shark wants a bite of you? Shut up.
Pat was now crossing the chasm.
What if the fishing boat has sunk down there? Then that’s it.
The torch found the other side and then something long and dark on the top. Pat thrust towards the shape, keeping his beam on it. The shape didn’t look like a fishing boat, more like a whale, but nothing looked normal in the dark water.
When he got closer his beam picked out something that looked like a thick spear thrusting into a whale’s belly.
No, it’s a broken mast. The fishing boat has been flipped over.
He slowed down as he approached the wreck. He could see the thick barnacles and clumps of seaweed clinging to the hull and then gaping holes towards the stern. There was a dark cavity behind the splintered mast, where the wheelhouse had been.
Pat slid his body under the scorched deck towards the dark cavity – and stopped. His wandering torch picked out the mast where it had plunged into the sand and it was bulging slightly. He realised the mast was propping up the length of the fishing boat. If it snapped the deck would slam down on the sand, trapping him in the hull.
Treasure Hunters Page 11